


come a little bit closer

by ishka



Category: Free!
Genre: Alternate Universe, Drama & Romance, M/M, Mild Sexual Content, Minor Violence, background horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-27
Updated: 2018-06-27
Packaged: 2019-05-29 06:21:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,128
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15067040
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ishka/pseuds/ishka
Summary: It is so effortlessly easy to envision the outside of right now falling away as loose sheets on the wind when Makoto reminds him that they are stronger than the sum of what haunts and hunts them. They learned it together. Sometimes Sousuke forgets.(A Quiet Place AU)





	come a little bit closer

**Author's Note:**

> i've never apologized for cherry picking only the good and interesting parts out of movies and twisting them into AUs only i asked for and i won't start now. it might help to be familiar with a quiet place to get why some details are the way they are here, but it really isn't imperative.
> 
> despite the source material this is not intended to be horror-forward. however, it is [neil young-forward.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2MtEsrcTTs)
> 
> thank you to [teresa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/maybeillride) for her priceless input and insight on this one and general support ♥

Armed with a lockpick, Sousuke stares down a minefield.

The pharmacy’s alarm system uses a battery-powered back-up. It’s to prevent looting in the event of a catastrophe big enough to include a complete power grid failure. It is only one of a handful of establishments which hasn’t been turned inside out for its contents or torn down in a rage for its lack of. The glass is intact, the sale signs are as they were left, the items on the shelves are in order and undisturbed. The warning is scrawled on a sign, bold and threatening:

ALARM WILL SOUND.

The convenience store next to it has been stripped of everything but the cash register. The law firm, the insurance agency, the acupuncturist’s office across the street have all been gutted by unchecked flame, charred black and half-collapsed. This business area is clear now where a few weeks ago it was still overrun. Sousuke counts it among his few blessings.

It isn’t the same story for the residential areas, where families still cower and carve out their meagre existences, where there are beds and clothes and there is shelf-stable food for now. An enticing option all around, until the children who don’t know better wail and cry or an abandoned pet howls, barks, or meows. It draws the beasts in, sometimes for days. Sousuke would rather grapple with hunger and stick to the outskirts; his deep dive into Tokyo today is one of necessity.

The street is cluttered with thousands upon thousands of pieces of paper, trash, debris. Things that crunch underfoot, loose things that rattle in the wind. Street lights dangle precariously by one bolt, or one wire, and threaten to crash to the ground without warning, any moment.

The end of this pilgrimage stands on the other side of it. He gets in for what he needs or he dies trying, and he’s made his peace with that. The easiest way to get in— breaking the windows— is too loud and will take too long. Were it viable, someone else would’ve already done it. His only option is the shop door.

He assumes three things about the pharmacy’s back-up: the power supply is a portable unit, the unit only covers the door, and the unit has an off switch. He assumes three things about himself: he can pick the lock, find the power supply, and shut it off in time to run far, far away until they leave.

He’ll know if it worked if he lives long enough to run.

And it will work. It has to work.

Sousuke allows himself one last look up and down the street for anything he might’ve missed, anything with the potential to endanger him that he would not be able to account for once he takes his first step. It’s all as good as it’s going to get, he knows. This isn’t ideal, but none of it ever was. The alarm will sound, it is inevitable. They will come for it, they will find nothing to slaughter, they will leave. Sousuke will get in and get out with what he needs, no time more and no time less.

Calloused, bare feet carry him across the minefield. Barefoot makes for silent steps, if at the expense of the occasional bloody trail courtesy a hidden shard of glass or something equally as annoying. He holds a wary eye on one street sign half a block up the road, one that sways a little too much, one that will fall soon into the windshield below it, and summon a meeting of nightmares to its location. Sousuke would be nonethewiser should it happen without his having eyes on it. That’s what worries him most of all, but his attention is better invested in the maze in front of him.

Inches from his destination, a rueful gale gusts down the corridor. He holds his breath against it and waits for more pieces of the world to fall, ready to abandon the plan and sprint for his life. Signs shudder harder, traffic lights swing in wider arches, garbage lifts and shifts into low spirals and floats along behind the surge.

The gale passes through, nothing else breaks that he can see.

His hands are trembling long before he gets the tension wrench and pick set into the lock. He tells himself he’s not afraid, it’s only adrenaline. He’s lying. His back is exposed. A cattle herd could sneak up on him right now and he’d never know if the ground didn’t shake to warn him. He can spare no unit of focus to anywhere other than the task before him. The pick kit is a piece of contraband given to him as a gift from overseas a lifetime ago that he never thought to learn to use until recently, and it takes effort to use it by feel alone. One by one, the binding pins set, until he is able to turn the lock over. It’s done.

He’s soaked through with sweat. That was the easy part.

The tremble ensnares his arms, his shoulders, his core. Paralysis seizes his senses and locks out his joints. He needs to make noise first to get the silence he’s truly after. He needs to do the only thing he isn’t supposed to do. They will come. That is the only guarantee. They will come and he can’t be there when they do. Sousuke’s heart is near to bursting. The longer he thinks about it the more inset his paralysis becomes.

So he stops thinking about it. He opens the door.

A dreadful realization crawls up through the soles of his feet, a telltale pattern of violent vibrations encircling his location: they’re already here.

* * *

 

Gentle, now.

Sousuke bows his head. It hangs, a dead weight between his shoulders. He presses cracked, torn lips to dazzlingly hot, dry skin. He lingers there, a body pushed near to collapse and a neck unwilling to righten.

When Makoto opens his eyes, they’re thick and sunken with sleep and sick. He does not startle as he usually does, gasping to life no matter how careful Sousuke tries to be when he wakes him. Instead Makoto drowns Sousuke in his misery, and pushes him away with one weak arm until Sousuke relents and sits back onto the floor of an unswept tool shed on the backlot of a sawmill.

Sousuke grabs his bag and spreads his spoils before him: two courses of antibiotics, a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, a tube of antiseptic gel, a box of bandages, and a Kit-Kat.

Immediately, he doses Makoto with the antibiotic. He cradles Makoto’s head in the crook of his arm, he holds a tablet to Makoto’s lips until it is taken, he tips Makoto’s water bottle to his mouth just barely, and he ensures Makoto’s throat bobs with finality. He then moves on to address the wound, the one Makoto insists he does not remember receiving, the one that festered and now threatens them.

As Sousuke cleans and dresses the cut-turned-death sentence on the underside of Makoto’s forearm, Makoto watches him, consciousness slowly returning from neverwhere. He does not bare clenched teeth to blunt the sting of the hydrogen peroxide, he makes no outward expression of relief in response to the cooled gel. There is only a hard line to his mouth and a defiant anger steeling his gaze even now, even after the fight that put it there has long come to pass, even after Makoto accepted— never agreed— that Sousuke would need to do this. Makoto is still upset.

(that’s what the kit-kat is for)

Only at the sight of Makoto’s arm firmly wrapped and protected in clean dressings does Sousuke dare to exhale the tension which has been slowly compressing his spine into a dense disk. And angry with him he may be, but Makoto takes Sousuke’s hand where it drops in front of his knees palm-up, fingers relaxed and curled, and he squeezes with what he can, which is not much. Sousuke’s relief is fleeting, taken from him through the contact of Makoto’s clammy palm, reminding him they let it go on for too long. They are at the mercy of time now.

Sundown bleeds from breaks between shed slats, desaturated dusk seeps up from the floor. Sousuke follows the slow pull of light retreating from Makoto’s face before it’s too dark to see him, when all that remains is touch and an ever-present taste of metal and dirt. Every night they are unable to make a fire, he shakes, he is wretchedly sick to his stomach, he is possessed by a fear words don't exist for until dawn returns and chases his tremors and terrors away. All of this for the one fact he knows in his bones to be true.

Without light, Sousuke cannot protect him.

A few days past the window of denial that everything would go back to normal soon, Makoto looked at him with tarry, black hopelessness clouding in from the edges of his irises, and he set fire to what was left of the world with only a callous sweep of silent hands. He said it from the darkest corner of his being, a corner Sousuke hasn't seen since and not one he has decided if he ever wants to see again. Makoto has never broken Sousuke’s heart as irrevocably and irreparably as he did when he said Sousuke cannot protect him.

And should Makoto not have said it, Sousuke would be dead. His own pride a tightened noose around his neck, and the mangling the monsters do only a secondary fatality. Sousuke would rather be chided and admonished an infinitesimal number of times over for his stupidity than leave Makoto no one to chide and admonish. Acting so stupidly so as to forfeit his life is not an option. Makoto’s anger with his daredevil plan for reliable medical supplies is anger Sousuke deserves, but doing nothing and watching Makoto succumb to infection was never an option either.

Makoto releases his hand, and reaches up to to tap his jaw for his diverted attention. Sousuke returns it to him.

 _You ran into trouble_ , Makoto declares, signing sloppy and tired but silent lips forming and giving rigidity to his words.

Sousuke shakes his head to deny it. _Pharmacy was wide open. Walked in, walked out. No monsters._

Makoto rolls his eyes, and points to Sousuke’s scraped elbows. To his scraped wrists. To a tear in his shirt at the collar. To a square of road rash on the side of his forehead. _Trouble,_ he repeats, straightened palms crossing to form the term more severely the second time.

 _Fine_ , Sousuke concedes. _A little trouble, but only once. All this —_ he gestures to his blemishes— _is from the same crash and burn._

He’s unimpressed. Makoto sighs. _Why?_

And Sousuke grins. _Because it’s you._

He does not want Makoto to press him for the story, he does not need Makoto to know how close, how fucking close, he came to witnessing his own evisceration. Makoto doesn’t like it when Sousuke says things like: _you have to be okay to do it without me_ , and certainly wouldn’t like to learn it was all he could think about as he dove with abandon below the nearest car on the road and waited to die, an enraged beast on his heels determined to do him the honors for his unholy, noisy transgressions. Perhaps a cosmic injustice considering Sousuke can’t hear the noises that enrage the hunters into their slaughtering frenzies.

Ultimately, when salvation comes in the form of that metal sign he was so worried about finally snapping free of its holds and tumbling from a height tall enough to shatter the windshield below it as predicted, he doesn’t ask too many questions about the timing. He is only grateful it must have been louder than the agonizing slam of his battered heart, and offensive for long enough to ensure he could get away to safety and hide until the nightmares dispersed.

He does not want Makoto to press, and Makoto gives him a look that says next time, he will, but tonight, he is tired.

 _Be more careful_ , he says instead.

 _Says you,_ Sousuke retorts, _you clumsy shit._

Makoto looks away, remembering he is supposed to be angry. Even when Sousuke brandishes the candied peace offering, Makoto isn’t moved. Sousuke pinches the package at the top, prepared to tear it open anyway, hoping the scent entices him, only for Makoto to catch him suddenly and firmly at his wrist.

He shakes his head. _Too loud_. _It crinkles._

 _It’s all we got,_ Sousuke counters. _You gotta eat. I’ll open it slow._

There’s enough light remaining to catch a flicker of Makoto’s hesitation. He’s starving, he won’t admit it, but if he’s half as famished as Sousuke is, then he’s ready to eat boiled leather. Ironic, given their typically lush and forested environment. There should be plenty to eat, and there might be, but they can’t identify what’s safe. Autumn has made a skeletal graveyard of the trees and vegetation, diminishing the options within their already limited knowledge further.

They’re small and simple city boys who grew up with four walls and refrigerators and factories. Foraging for food they can trust has been an all-consuming ordeal. Even in Japan, where vending machines rule supreme, they go to bed hungry more often than not. The machines are too loud to break into, with most of the food within them gone bad by now. Occasionally they come across the rare machine with something edible and accessible they can stock up on. Or a grocery not entirely cleaned out of crackers. But once they go through that, it’s a return to a daily gamble. If Sousuke hadn’t been in such a panicked hurry, he would’ve grabbed more from the pharmacy.

Makoto compromises. He ambles onto his elbows, shifts back to lean his shoulders and head against the wall, and slides the candy bar from Sousuke’s grasp to take the hearing-sensitive task upon himself. Once it’s open, the sweet scent is downright debilitating. Makoto’s collected demeanor falters, exposing the depth of his struggle beneath. Sousuke sits back, and thinks better of asking for a piece as he planned to. It’s stupid to sacrifice his needs like that when Makoto is depending on his strength, but in this case now that there’s first aid available, the healing takes precedence.

 _You eat_ , Sousuke says, intercepting the protest. _I had my own snack on the way back._

Makoto allows himself to believe it for the first piece, eyes slipping shut, jaw chewing slow, chest swelling with what Sousuke assumes is a satisfied sigh. He’s hungrier than Sousuke wagered, as he eats the second bar too without a lick of his typical unwarranted guilt. He sets the other half down on his chest to speak.

_Take the rest. I’m not stupid, Sousuke._

He knows how this argument goes, they’ve had it a thousand times in a fraction of the days. He hates how it makes them both upset and irritated with each others’ best intentions, and he doesn’t want to have it today. The day has been too long, his worry is too taxing. So he takes the third bar, and does his due diligence in good faith, and savors a wholly selfish bite of fat and sugar, replete with an exaggerated eyeroll of delight just to lift Makoto’s spirits.

Like a charm, Makoto is smiling.

 _See? Chocolate’s good,_ Makoto says, a vitality to his signing Sousuke has missed dearly. _It only took the end of the world for you to notice._

Sousuke plucks the last bar from its spot on Makoto’s sternum, and holds it loosely between his lips. He tips an invisible cowboy hat, and throws Makoto a cheesy wink. Whatever’s left of Makoto’s distress from the argument preceding the pharmacy submits to the laugh he stifles into the back of his hand. Sousuke gets through half the bar when Makoto interrupts and beckons him forward, waving him in close.

When Sousuke complies, Makoto reaches across to hold him by the back of his neck, and pulls him nose to nose. He takes the last bite of dangling chocolate from Sousuke’s lips, does nothing to thank him for it, and dares Sousuke to allow him to get away with it scott-free. Sousuke knows that mischievous gaze when he sees it, narrow and golden, regardless how long it’s been soberingly absent until now.

It is so effortlessly easy to envision the outside of right now falling away as loose sheets on the wind when Makoto reminds him that they are stronger than the sum of what haunts and hunts them. They learned it together. Sometimes Sousuke forgets.

Makoto is sick and exhausted and it shows; there is nothing romantic in another’s suffering. But he is also a formidable fighter, breathtakingly resilient, and beautiful in a space beyond material that only Sousuke can experience and can never explain to himself, much less anyone else. It is uniquely Makoto’s space, both soundless and under seige of symphony.

But Sousuke is no poet. There aren’t words in his arsenal for any of what he feels and experiences with Makoto, leaving his actions the burden of speaking for him. Makoto strokes the side of his face with the back of his hand and softens into their peace, a contentment so genuine and unrestrained Sousuke’s confident at least today, despite the danger and the strife, he’s done the right thing.

Touch overtakes sight with the arrival of nightfall. A bottomless graciousness consumes and quiets errant thoughts, making room for a kiss to hold them together. It’s a precious thread of hope that he has Makoto with him at all. He wants Makoto to know this, with all of the words that don’t exist to convey what it means to him. So Sousuke makes it count, makes it deep, presses hard into all of Makoto like Makoto demands of him as he entangles his fingers in his hair, and Sousuke tips the world over along with them.

They part and meet, an ebb and flow; this is enough, to hold and be held. Makoto says things into Sousuke’s ear he knows Sousuke will never decipher by the ghosting of his lips alone. They’re confessions and secrets and all the truths Makoto thinks Sousuke isn’t ready for. There are lies as well, spoken aloud just beneath a whisper, because Makoto isn’t ready for everything either. He may not be able to hear them, but Sousuke knows they’re lies because Makoto is careful not to brand them into Sousuke’s skin like he does his truths.

Sousuke has secrets too. He is mindful not to wake Makoto as they terrorize him.

Gentle, now.

* * *

 

Eventually they succumb to winter.

Hinohara village, a place so laughably beyond their means before, proves a begrudged compromise now. This was a festive town before, Makoto tells him, soft with nostalgia. He’d been here once for Obon, awed by all the modern fireworks and traditional dances. Sousuke says it’s a good place to settle, then, and jokes that it must keep good spirits.

But Makoto did not want to settle anywhere. He wanted to keep moving, keep searching, and find a safe way to travel far out of Tokyo. Sousuke did not want to die of exposure. He convinced Makoto it would be counterproductive to finding anyone, anywhere if they were dead.

Over the course of the season, the Tokyo neighborhoods they made a point to avoid thinned out, building by building, whether it was by choice or grave error. They got better at foraging the very outskirts of Tokyo, where the forest meets the steel, as a matter of life and death until it was too cold to bother. They needed another food source, and stumbling on the brink of giving up into a silent, abandoned Hinohara was as good a sign as any.

Makoto only compromises for winter, Sousuke promises they’ll leave by the end of it, and in a slow blink they go to sleep entangled and shivering and wake up overheated, the last day of spring sitting heavy in the room.

Time is shockingly easy to unlearn, Sousuke would dare say it’s natural. Hours are equally interchangeable with days. So long as they want for no basic needs, there is no reason to keep track. Here there are stores— an entire granary and thensome— of dried goods left behind and rivers to wash and to fish, waiting for either of them to develop the skill to build and work a trap. There is shelter, there is warmth. There are pockets of days where Makoto claims the world is quiet because it is at peace, and not because it cowers in fear. Here they rarely encounter the hunters, there is only evidence of their proliferation from a distance.

But here they are also alone.

Regardless the comfort a bed provides, Makoto is never comfortable. It hurts Sousuke in a place he can’t reach to watch him pace the ghostly village in visible agitation, it hurts worse to accompany him on another trip into the greater city and end up right where they started, literally and figuratively, over and over and over. Sousuke doesn’t explain anymore that wandering aimlessly around Tokyo without a plan isn’t a fruitful use of their energy, not to mention recklessly dangerous. Makoto doesn’t listen. He goes anyway, and Sousuke follows him without complaint.

What Makoto searches for are answers, something Tokyo provided him once upon a time, but no longer can. It’s a reality Makoto has yet to reconcile with himself. Sousuke is patient until such a reckoning occurs, because one day it will. Unlike Sousuke, Makoto is never lost for too long.

Makoto plans dead ends, he theorizes impossibilities. He outlines his agenda each morning over dried fruit and slow-cooked grain, he makes preparations for journeys they’ll never be able to embark on. Sousuke agrees with what might be harmless, he makes suggestions to better what certainly won’t be, and above all he doesn’t allow Makoto to dream too big. He tells him no. It crushes Makoto, but Makoto won’t leave him behind to descend into unknowing, and so they stay and thrive in purgatory.

This is how Sousuke learns to protect him. As long as it takes.

The thick winter blanket they’ve shared all these weeks is no longer welcome on their bed. They’ve taken up residence in the cellar of a former foods smokehouse, mattress and frame painstakingly moved down the stairs upon arrival in a daring bid for even the illusion of peace of mind. Sleeping underground affords them a priceless, precious layer of protection worth the risk of the move. For example, Sousuke can fold a blanket with a certain degree of confidence that it will not make enough noise to get them killed. He has no point of reference regarding how loud a blanket is versus any other textile out there, but Makoto doesn’t pull that deer-in-headlights expression when Sousuke fixes the bed, like he does when Sousuke thoughtlessly clears his throat or hums or mutters or steps on an elusive squeaky plank that seems to travel up and down the staircase, depending on the time of day and weather conditions. Sousuke’s world is always silent, but to Makoto’s perpetual exasperation, he is apparently quite noisy.

He makes a neatly folded square of it to store away where they originally found it, smoothing the surface flat as he ruminates on the virtues of bothering to fold or fix anything anymore. As he stands before the bed, an aged smoky cedar fills the room drafting down from upstairs where it’s stained into the smokehouse walls from years of operation, and he counts backwards from twelve, because that’s how long Makoto takes to descend the stairs and walk to him.

There’s a morning routine not even Sousuke is stupid enough to take for granted when they’re in the mood to perform it, which is not always, and more like rarely. Today they are lucky.

It wouldn’t be an authentic ritual without its false start, when they first get out of bed and Makoto is groggy and grumpy and untouchable and Sousuke is hungry with higher thought in retrograde. Sousuke’s morning truly starts after a necessary mutual solitude spent rectifying these situations, soaking up sunlight and contemplating bedding. When they come back together, the course is made right with Makoto’s arms around and crossed in front of Sousuke’s chest and a sigh raising goosebumps across the back of his neck. It’s never fully realized without _good morning, Sousuke_ signed over his skin, above his swelling heart, nor can Sousuke make a proper prayer of it without covering Makoto’s hands with his own. He’s been told folding hands around prayers wards out the devils, one of those things he doesn’t believe in but now that he knows, it can’t hurt.

He’s never asked, because mysteries have their value, but he hopes that Makoto’s morning begins here too: hands to heart. Without either, they’re nothing. In another life Sousuke would scoff at that hippie bullshit. But there’s no pretense now, no act to put on for the world and no material possessions to buy or reputations to build to put off confronting the only thing of true value at the center of life. They keep to this oath as best they can because it’s the only thing they do anymore that resembles anything they did before.

Sousuke turns to face him. _Welcome back_ , he says in kind. _You were gone a while. Walk?_

 _I went to the waterfall,_ he reveals. _I like it there._

Sousuke nods his acknowledgement, but it would not be Sousuke if he did not also voice his concern. _You said yourself it’s too loud over there. You won’t hear anything if it sneaks up on you._

Makoto shrugs. _You can’t hear no matter where you are and you do all right._

Sousuke rolls his eyes, but leaves it be, smarter by now than to walk into a trap where he inadvertently insults himself. _Well, are you human now?_

Makoto rocks a flattened hand side to side, angle as crooked as his sheepish smile— _debatable—_ and Sousuke quickly does away with the rest of the distance.

This space, their time, is already almost up. Sousuke prolongs the inevitable and pushes his fingers through Makoto’s tangles on either side of his head to draw him forward and kiss another dopey smile into his memories. Makoto has asked that he not do this, that Sousuke allow it to end when it should, and even plants his palms across Sousuke’s abdomen poised with the threat of pushing him away to enforce it. He won’t. He’ll kiss Sousuke back twofold what he’s given, and he does.

Sometimes this lack of discipline devolves further by way of strained and shuddering breaths, when they’re tired of talking with their hands and desperate for touch and heat and the unrivaled wholeness only that combination can give them. It is their act of defiance, louder than the universe, shared on a frequency that monsters cannot hear. Something they took for granted before, and is sacred beyond measure now.

But only sometimes, and not today. Sousuke’s may be present, but this morning Makoto’s heart beats elsewhere. Sousuke doesn’t feel the hammer of his pulse beneath his hands as they fall to brace his neck, doesn’t sense the heat on his cheeks that would be there if the rest of him were. Makoto sees Sousuke hesitate as he realizes it, and Makoto’s ensuing smile is profoundly sad and too apologetic when he doesn’t need to be sorry. If either of them capitulate to obligation, it’s just another meaningless act in an already senseless world, and Sousuke won’t abide either Makoto or himself to self-destruct like that.

Makoto kisses him patiently, warmly once more with both the depth of promise and the swiftness of finality, and Sousuke is the one to let Makoto go. He thinks, as they ascend the stairs one at a time to share the one meal of the day that is always statistically most likely to be their last, that letting Makoto go will always be, in any context, the last thing he wants to do.

* * *

 

They have spent more days at the Isukaichi Library than Sousuke has bothered to keep track of. Makoto doesn’t plan for it even if he makes the best of it, carrying around his returns in his backpack and swapping them out with new books if they happen to pass by or need to stop. Each step farther from their insulated shelter is another into a territory of contingency, and they know for a fact the library is intact and well laid out for a quick, unblocked back exit as much as it is accessible from the front.

An aggressive early summer storm has forced them to suspend their journey inwards early. Visibility is too low, even for Makoto who does not rely on sight as much as Sousuke needs to. The discordance a storm brings about can make the beasts act unpredictably. There is no way to anticipate what type of arbitrary organic noise could draw them to their location, no way of knowing how many are lurking in the misty downpour directly in front of their steps or hidden among the trees overgrown onto the path, whose branches tangle to the whims of whipping winds in weaves of obfuscation and illusion.

And so they hide between the book covers until the entropy passes through, and Makoto, frustrated and unapproachable, searches for his answers on paper instead. Sousuke keeps vigil on the ground floor while Makoto separates and recluses into his anger on the second. He doesn’t like Sousuke to see him undone, and Sousuke isn’t comfortable without his eyes on the outside and his feet close to earth when Makoto is too turned in to hear for them.

Of course, it isn’t the setback itself. Whether they walked another ten kilometers into the city or never left the village at all, there would be nothing to uncover by nightfall they didn’t already know. Makoto understands this even as he does not accept it. Makoto accepts very little, in actuality, and as is often the problem. His anger stems from hopelessness, exacerbated when he is forced into a space where he has no choice but to sit with his grief and converse with it. At least when they walk and search themselves to exhaustion, there is the façade of having done something, anything, for answers.

The storm has only strengthened in the time they’ve spent cooped up— hours? Only Makoto keeps a wristwatch, and the sun isn’t visible. Makoto says the sound of rain is the closest thing he feels to home whenever Sousuke catches him staring out at it, or curiously on other occasions, standing in it. But the way it hammers the ground in revolving opaque sheets as Sousuke watches it now seems like it would sound anything but reminiscent of Iwatobi. Visually, it doesn’t remind him of them at all.

He sets his jaw hard, swallows a sigh.

Early on, thoughts of them were troublesome and a point of internal contention when he needed his thoughts exclusively centered on _us_ for the sake of survival. He has learned over the last few months to be kinder to himself when his discipline proves imperfect, or else the denial internalizes and makes him behave in ways that do not protect him or Makoto. He allows the thought to form, even holds it in his mind and gives it shades of red and blue and space to float. But he never allows it to settle. He exhales it on one long breath, and returns his thoughts to his watch.

There’s no foolproof way when out on the road for Makoto to get Sousuke’s attention without potentially inadvertently startling him, especially should he be deep in thought and focused beyond distraction on a world in tumult past the library windows. The sudden figure in his peripheral nearly sends him clean out of his skin; usually it’s Sousuke who goes to retrieve Makoto, not the other way around, and he was not expecting that to be any different this time.

Makoto already has _sorry_ poised on his hands and signs it emphatically before Sousuke can get his heart rate under control again. He isn’t outwardly angry anymore, but Sousuke isn’t sure if he prefers it to the sense of longing that’s replaced it now hanging around Makoto’s rolled shoulders as a thick, heavy curtain.

He stands from his wheeled office chair and smooths down the front of his shirt, bunched and wrinkled in a damning demonstration of poor posture. _What’s wrong?_

Makoto doesn’t show or tell Sousuke anything he hasn’t thought through extensively, so when he chews his lip to stall the answer and second guess his decision, Sousuke hurries to him, fearing the abstract worst. _Makoto?_

 _I found a- a,_ he stutters, hands unsteady with emotion and fumbling for the proper term, _power bank. With a charge, and a cord. It charged my phone. It can turn on._

Sousuke gave up and tossed his phone into a junk box ages ago. He didn’t know Makoto carried his around. Nor the earbuds he pulls out of his backpack along with it. A knot of dread pulls tight in his stomach. A charged wariness at the intersection of fear and hope carves lines into Makoto’s expression in places Sousuke has never seen crease before.

Suddenly the subtle, distant tremor Sousuke picks up beneath the pads of his feet is not half as terrifying as the device Makoto holds between them. Makoto looks up and out the window at the hunter slinking by when he hears it, shortly after Sousuke felt it, and just as quickly disregards it. It can’t see them. Usually that isn’t enough to keep them calm given how quickly the creatures can turn on a dime. They’re reminded there are still far greater threats in the world than the hunters, somehow. It walks its heavy steps through the storm and past their line of sight, stopping to flare its head plates out and gnash its gnarled, razor teeth, and keeps on once the distraction has passed, nonethewiser to its prey watching it go through tinted windows not three meters away. It senses them, it will be back, the hunters always hone in on their prey no matter how quiet Makoto and Sousuke are. They’ll be forced to sneak out, as usual. But not yet.

Makoto finds the nearest library work table and settles at it, eyes only leaving the phone when necessary to navigate. Sousuke sits next to him. The phone lays facing up in the middle, still off. The table is small enough to see it from any angle if they lean forward.

 _Are you sure about this?_ Sousuke asks.

 _No,_ Makoto answers, and then connects the earbuds to the jack and powers on the phone. _But I have to do it._

He navigates the interface as soon as the device boots, pecking at it from a distance like the screen runs too hot to hold in his palm:

unlock  
menu  
gallery  
videos

He takes up one earbud, and offers the second to Sousuke. It throws him off his axis. Sousuke doesn’t know how to react to it, or understand why Makoto would bother. He seizes up and stares and shrinks impossibly small in his seat, even as Makoto insists it forward, and in the end it’s only because of Makoto’s uncharacteristic thoughtlessness that he takes it at all, too stunned to perform anything other than a reflex response. The bud sits odd and uncomfortable in his unaccustomed ear, like it’ll fall out with the smallest tilt of his head.

Even once his hands are free to do so, Makoto doesn’t explain himself, he just opens the fourth video on his camera roll and turns to Sousuke to ensure he’s placed his earbud, too. He reaches up to press it closer, ensures it’s snug, and Sousuke fights back a smarmy, wounded eyeroll. Makoto does all this quickly before a wavering will gets the better of him, and because the battery did not charge even a quarter of the way.

The video loads, and they fall still, breaths stopping at the roofs of their mouths, and rolling back in freefall down their throats.

A wide view of a white tile floor swings up and captures Ran grinning ear to ear, a wrapped gift in hand. She shakes it next to her face, teenaged deviousness on the raise of her brow until something stops her mid shake, and she lowers it sheepishly. Gou cuts in and wags a finger at Ran first, then the camera. The phone whips around to its operator: Makoto shakes his head, says something, and turns the phone back out.

The view returns to the ground and bounces with Makoto’s steps. He was never much for videography. When it pans up, he’s in the Tachibana living room. Ren stands in the corner with his father. Mrs. Tachibana speaks on the phone near the sliding door to the backyard, below a decorative birthday banner. The way the camera lingers on them indicates Makoto is narrating. Ran and Gou join the room, deep in conversation, Ran a studious devotee to her idol.

Makoto turns to his right. Sousuke is half-fused to the sofa and sprawled over two of the three cushions. He greets Makoto with a lazy wave of the arm stretched along the back of the sofa and a ghost of a smile the video doesn’t pick up; it only exists in memory.

Then there’s Rin. Sometimes called fiery or powerful or passionate, true in the way one describes the outside of something, never having seen what it contains. He’s wedged onto the third cushion between Sousuke and the arm, turned to the side with both feet flat— but relaxed— against Sousuke’s side. An aborted turf war. He grins in Makoto’s direction, points at Sousuke as only a world traveler would deem acceptable, and flicks his wrist around for a one finger salute. Sousuke grabs his hand and shoves it back at him, laughing.

Rin shouts at Makoto, spoken too quickly to read off his lips. Sousuke adds: _he has the daintiest feet._ Rin flips him off again.

(rin says to sousuke, off screen and a moment after makoto is gone, with hands more practised and precise than makoto’s, and a delivery more direct than makoto’s: _you’re so happy._ and sousuke swats rin on the side of his knee, and fails to shake him of that deadly soft and private smile sousuke can hardly bear, and sousuke replies: _don’t be so sentimental.)_

The first blur in the lower left-hand corner of the video is missable, the second is blatant and pulls Makoto away, the third swivel manages to focus and expose the crown of a head, and the shot drops down to capture one dictionary definition of exasperation, conveyed through two blue eyes.

Haru’s lips were always more readable than anyone else’s; he never needed to learn as much signing as Makoto had to to communicate with Sousuke as effectively, though he typically chose text. “Seriously, a video?” His eyebrows crease faintly only like they do when he’s listening to Makoto speak. His eyes widen in surprise, and he bursts into a laugh as strongly as Haru ever bursts into anything, which is reminiscent of the final resting place of waves breaking soft snaps over smooth shorelines.

The video stops here, Haru’s mirth suspended in time, until the screen times out and goes black.

Sousuke’s certain Makoto has left the room, the sensation of presence at his side has been replaced by cold and vacant space. He feels nothing, not his own pulse, not his body, and when he turns to find out where Makoto went because sometimes he needs Makoto to be able to feel those things, he discovers Makoto never left. He sits still as stagnant water, eyes trained unblinking on his phone, hands slack with palms up on his lap.

Whatever it is that moves Sousuke’s arm towards the device, Sousuke doesn’t have a word for it. The point of juncture between mercy and devotion. Maybe it’s that, caked in a hard and bitter coating. Makoto doesn’t follow his movement or even care Sousuke’s taken the only evidence they ever had anything but each other. He navigates briskly to Makoto’s text messages, and aches with a pang of mourning for such a simpler method of communication which for so long made his bridge to the rest of the world a little stronger, made his relationships a little easier, made him feel a little less isolated among those who didn’t quite get it.

He never wanted to see what he’s looking for in Makoto’s messages until now, despite Makoto’s trying to show him, pleading even, despite his shameful barbed anger when Makoto wasn’t sensible enough to take no for an answer. A group text holds the last message Makoto was able to get through the network before the service went out:

_we’ll find a way to iwatobi. i promise. please be careful, we love you._

It’s not checked as seen by everyone it went to, only sent. But it’s not unreasonable to say most of them could’ve seen it.

Nor unreasonable that only one of them saw it. Maybe none of them did.

Sousuke powers off the phone, savoring the sliver of battery should Makoto want to watch it again later. He pulls out his earbud and rolls the wire back and forth between his thumb and forefinger, watching the bud spin with unfocused eyes before setting that down as well. He understands why Makoto made him use it, if he considers Makoto didn’t want to do that alone this time and refused to let Sousuke leave it to him to bear again. He is grateful now where he perhaps wasn’t when all of this was falling apart that Makoto has grown enough to trust him so entirely he would not only share his pain, but where he suffers it acutely. In so many fucked up ways he would never say and shouldn’t think, this world has changed them for the better.

He rests his hand on Makoto’s shoulder. When it garners him no response, he smooths along his upper back to cup the back of his neck, and pulls him in across the small gap between them and into his arms. It gives Sousuke form again. It lends Makoto a heartbeat. Makoto surrenders to it, his chest swells in Sousuke’s hold, deeply, firmly, choosing to breathe.

Grief was always the hardest part in all this.

* * *

 

Travels to Tokyo shudder and halt. Makoto stops returning his books.

A cosmically indifferent sun bakes deep fissures into the dirt. The rains came and went and didn’t come back, not like they used to, not like they should have. Where it should be thick and humid, the air is parched with kicked up sawdust. It builds in piles in corners, it whirls through the homes and the shops in lackadaisical spirals, kicked up alongside dead grass and burnt leaves by the wind. Makoto says he is worried about the volatility of it. Sousuke says there is no danger as long as there is no lightning, and are you trying to tell me something, are you smoking on the downlow?

A layer of grit and husk coats every surface, sticks beneath their tongues, draws blood from their noses and lips and knuckles. It makes lifeless vessels of them both, drained of energy and will before noon. Their cellar is cooler, so they stay there, but it is also dark and cramped. Bored or starved or both, the hunters have begun what may have always been an inevitable encroachment, but an encroachment they had put out of their minds until now anyway. Makoto now lies awake as often as Sousuke always has, hearing riflings and creaks and groans around the village that he does not. The hunters know there is something here, he says, and who is Sousuke to doubt it? They always hone in on their prey eventually.

When they get too close, Sousuke only knows of it by Makoto’s sudden stillness at his side and the spike in anxious air temperature. When Sousuke needs to wander above ground, Makoto is never too far behind him, fretful and flighty and peering around tricky corners. Sousuke hates it. Sousuke allows it.

The earth is slowly parting beneath them and they are trapped in the chasm left behind. The fear they’ve come to be ruled by a sinister slow boil, too late to escape once it consumed them. The only home their hearts are willing to sacrifice for is too far for the limits of the inexplicable terror Sousuke has grappled with since the onset, something he could not get a handle on before it ensnared Makoto and dragged him down, too. He doesn’t quiet the soundless voice in his head that tells him he’s failed to protect Makoto, and they’re already dead.

And yet when it is dark, and the danger is greatest, sometimes Makoto stubbornly digs his fingers into the earth and pulls the chasm back together, and he tells Sousuke to climb. He is so sure, so solid, that there is a way out somehow. Not today, or tomorrow, but someday. Sousuke isn’t, his trust is blind. He does as he is told.

Sousuke turns his face into the rough drag of Makoto’s hand at his cheek to muffle a groan into his palm. His breath is hot, not hotter than the air, but damper, rent from his lungs in stuttering pants as Makoto works every inch of him for everything he has to give. Makoto’s eyes never leave him. Makoto’s hands never leave him. Makoto fucks him as hard as he loves him. Sousuke digs his fingers into Makoto’s back until his grip shakes and his biceps ache, straining to silence himself from asking why Makoto would fucking bother.

Why, when it’s been months now without hope and he doesn’t need to pretend that this is enough for him when it isn’t and shouldn’t be, is he always and still so hauntingly present. Why, when he knows Sousuke wouldn’t choose to be anywhere other than right next to him, does he hold him closer yet. Why, when these moments already comprised of frightening vulnerability, would Makoto risk something more sacred than his body, more than Sousuke would ever ask of him to give.

He wonders why, even as Makoto bruises into his skin and pleads with his eyes, the only answer they have had since the start: _because it’s you._

And later, after they’ve languished wide awake well into the early morning staring up at the weathered panels of their ceiling, Makoto rises and goes to his belongings, and he returns with a phone and a pair of earbuds. He makes Sousuke sit next to him on the edge of the bed and has him put one bud in again, ignoring the sigh and the half-hearted protest. He powers on the phone and quickly taps to his media, and Sousuke doesn't want to see it again but will watch it as often as Makoto wants him to. With the battery draining to a red sliver, he figures it won’t survive another viewing anyway.

But Makoto chooses a song instead, one Sousuke recognizes the album cover for and one Makoto has declared is theirs and so, one Sousuke has memorized the words to. Makoto stands to face Sousuke with care not to dislodge the shared earpieces, and he offers a hand to take and a shoulder to rest on and a leading step into gracious sways and lazy swings.

Surely the battery runs down to silence shortly thereafter, but the dance and lyric carry on into dawn, well beyond the final note.

* * *

 

Later, when there is space and peace enough to stop and ponder how it could’ve happened and Makoto gets to scold him and say I Told You So, Sousuke will decide it was the heretic marriage of sunlight and sawdust which burned their crumbling sanctuary to the ground, no lightning starter necessary.

Now, though, there is only room for a primitive panic that smells like ignited pine and it looks like clouds of thick, choking smoke.

He bolts upright, hard enough to stir Makoto next to him from their midday sleep, the one they have to take because staying awake in this heat is too maddening. Sousuke shakes the grog out of Makoto through his shoulder, and in the next blink Makoto is up next to him, eyes wild and confused. The space is half-filled with smoke, wafting down the stairs from the storehouse where there must be too much of it for it all to rise as it should.

They dress. They dive for their pre-packed emergency backpacks, still helpless city boys in so many ways but not without the basic common sense to have made those early on once they settled. They don’t discuss it, whether or not this is an emergency, or if they’ll be able to come back here, or if they should get shirts on their backs now because it might be the only ones they have for a while, because they know all these things inherently to be the case.

They sprint for the stairs, and Sousuke confirms it is as bad as he thinks it might be, because when he pauses at the bottom out of habit to try and recall the quietest pathway he can never get right, Makoto grabs Sousuke by his wrist in a punishing grip and tows him up the flight and pays the wandering squeaky spot no mind.

In the middle of the day, it is black in the storehouse. Where he thought he had endured the worst of the heat the summer had to beat him down with, he is proven wrong. Cowering under a truck outside of a pharmacy, a mere meter was the closest he ever got to the hunters, and how much space that seems in comparison to the precious centimeters he stops short of barrelling into one now. Makoto pulls him left abruptly to avoid it, and Sousuke’s short-sighted reaction trips him backwards over his own foot. Gravity snaps him from the sure hand around his wrist and he lands hard, half back down the stairs at sharp angles that cut agonized starbursts between his eyes.

No sight. No sound. No air. No Makoto.

But there is the hunter, and it heard all that.

Sousuke rolls over and off the side of the staircase, dropping back into the cellar but in a moment of clarity, not letting go of the ledge. The hunter barrels down after him, and once it passes where Sousuke precariously hangs, he pulls himself back up and scrambles back into the main room of the storehouse. He keeps low, where he can still see and breathe somewhat, and barely makes it one full crawl before Makoto has him back in his grasp, harder this time, and they finish their escape to the door.

There is hell in unknowing, when infection and starvation allows no real rest. There is hell in grief, chronic and erosive. There is hell in hopelessness, muted, vast, and empty. But then there is also just hell on earth in the purest sense, when they step out of a burning home and into another nightmare in a long line of them. Because wood burns fast, but old and dried out wood burns faster, and it burns loudly. The hunters— the demons now, maybe— thrash in the street, striking out at crumbling walls ensconced in flames, attacking each other in the chaos, and where the road was so wide before it suddenly seems impossible to navigate through the fire and claws and teeth. Too many to count, Hinohara is overrun.

Makoto yanks him one way, abruptly stops, turns, yanks him another. He does this until they’ve spun in circles, all the while the road closes in and the exits fall to blockade one by one. Sousuke stumbles into and out of each jostling, stunned disorientation shutting his body down, because his mind is taking over. It’s too fast. The village is burning too fast, there are too many enraged hunters here all at once, and something else is going on. Then Makoto dives to the ground, pulling Sousuke down with him, just as they’re hit with an invisible force of heat and pressure that rattles Sousuke’s ribcage and rips the air from his lungs. An explosion.

Breathless, he stares up at sky on his back and watches the fireworks burst through the smoke, scores of them freed from their storage rooms, greens and reds and blues raining down and fizzling out.

Just in time for Obon.

Double vision splits and crosses and follows his line of sight down to his hand, still grasped. Makoto hasn’t dropped it despite the awkward hold as he heaves over his knees in child’s pose and gasps, coughs, tugs at Sousuke’s arm with only half attention while he catches his breath. Sousuke sits up, or intends to, but his head is swimming and the ground is upside down, and he feels the tremors travel through the earth that he knows too well, they’re too close, they are coming, and one moment he’s up on the heel of his palm and shouting nonsense for Makoto, because it doesn’t matter what he says or if they hear it now so long as he’s louder than Makoto, and the next he’s coming to, face down in the dirt and ash and alone.

It was just a moment, just enough of a blackout, to lose him.

Sousuke jumps to his feet and follows the newly thrashed road before him, where someone ran and something ran after it. Hinohara falls away to his periphery, the flames an afterthought, the cascading mini-explosions something to step over, the smoke a minor inconvenience. He follows the path to the granary and garden barn, and once inside expects a bloodbath but instead encounters disheveled stillness. There are undisturbed and upright shelves of dried food, barrels of grain they hadn’t gotten to eating, all but half of the place is newly upturned. As he wanders deeper into the large storehouse, all the way to the back, there is no Makoto, part or all of him. It happens to impart the most hope he’s felt in eons, however short lived.

His skin breaks into goosebumps before the rest of him is aware of the reason: movement. To the left, on the other side of the shelf structure. It’s too tall to be Makoto. Too lurking, calculated. Sousuke turns around to visually follow its path, and walks small and careful steps back and to the side along the dead end wall to make distance. The beast rounds the corner, standing at the top of the aisle Sousuke is trying to back out of. It flares its headplates, searching for sound. It cocks its jaw, tests the ground in front of it for obstruction with it’s boney, jointed arms, and must decide it hears something worth investigating. It walks towards him. It blocks the exit.

Sousuke’s sure what it hears is his unfettered panic: the surge of blood through dilated veins, the heartbeat shaking his entire chest, his rattling knees, his thick and cotton-dry swallows. He covers his mouth with his hand, not trusting himself to stay silent as it zeroes in on him, and just in time to catch most of his sharp gasp when he forgets to tread lightly and steps back and sinks his heel down onto the prongs of a berry rake.

He catches most of his gasp. And not enough of it.

The beast lunges its limbs and gnashes its teeth. Sousuke turns to sprint and go wide to catch the exit. He can’t outrun it, but he has sense enough to pull obstacles down along the way; jars, tools, cans, whatever he can grab. It buys some time, but not even adrenaline is going to carry a bruised body as fast as he needs to go, and his exhaustion severely limits any creativity to make up for it. Just as quickly as his pursuer fell behind, it’s back and swinging for him.

He howls in shock and pain when the beast’s arm swings down, just misses hooking him over his shoulder to drag him in, and carves a jagged lesion down the center of his back instead. Through his bag, his shirt, through the skin, through the muscle, so sudden so blunt so impossibly strong he doesn’t hold his footing, and crashes forward into a rack of specialty saws and shears, sending them scattered.

Crawl, then. Scamper off. Weak. The only difference between one dumb prey animal to the next is that some learn how to run just a little bit farther, last a few precious seconds longer, before succumbing. This dumb prey animal knows exactly how it ends and desperately tries to get away anyway, fighting to stand against pools of his own sweat and blood stripping away any traction he garners off the varnished wooden floor.

The hunter trips about the tools and slides clumsily over the flat sheets of steel and mess, its blindness a small blessing that won’t make much of a difference in the end, but it’s just enough delay for Sousuke to find his feet, not long enough to make space for false hope. It doesn’t immediately launch itself after him once it stabilizes, but it still hurries forward on its grotesque and gangly limbs. It still knows where Sousuke should be.

He breaks free of the granary and stumbles back into the fire and the smoke. Instinct drops him low to avoid another hunter barreling in from the right. He only gets away because it crashes into the first one and tangles them up, but the twist in his torso aggravates the forgotten wound on his back, and at the same time one of the hunters loses its fight with the other and skids ahead of him through the dirt, split open and dead. The shock and sting of it all off-centers him into the wall and his startled voice betrays him again, all that discipline and focus it takes to stay silent on the backburner in favor of survival instinct. The victor follows him. Sousuke doesn’t look back anymore so he won’t know when it catches up. A self-identified know it all, even he knows when ignorance really is bliss.

Sousuke limps along the structure through the smoke and over far-flung lumps of burning debris. His airways are inflamed and charred, his muscles cramp and give in, consciousness slowly succumbs to mere suggestion. He sifts through any manner of appropriate final thoughts, and settles for cursing the fucking berry rake first, and then he simply dares to hope that Makoto finally accepted this. That he would have to be okay to do this without Sousuke, just like he promised would happen one day.

The smoke begins to thin out, and he can see the sun again, and with it returns a reminder. He is no rat. Why run, where is the defiance in that, the defiance he so admires in Makoto? So he stops and he turns around to face it; there was nowhere else to hide anyway.

And he is indescribably angry, to endure all of this bullshit for so long, to treat it as a deal with the devil in exchange for the one selfishly naive belief that he has succeeded in spite of everything, that he has protected Makoto somehow, and that Makoto is far away by now and safe somewhere, to fully turn and not immediately die for it.

The hunter is suspended in time, limbs outstretched for him, teeth bared for him, armor plates flared out as far as they can stretch— and it is motionless, stone solid, until it isn’t. It twitches and writhes and it collapses in unnatural folds into the ashes. Sousuke’s pinpointed, adrenaline-narrowed vision widens, and the ground rises up to meet his knees or maybe it’s that he’s falling, falling, fell, surrealized, floating and flattened.

It contorts in dramatic death throes before him, one long hay fork jammed deep into the softer flesh between the two largest head plates, until it is motionless again. And Makoto, in no better shape than the burning, crumbling backdrop behind him, steps away from it to go to Sousuke like killing it was something unremarkable and like his body can still move without pain when it looks like it shouldn’t be able to.

His complexion is a step below transparent, sickly pallid in tone, and chillingly clammy to the touch, which Sousuke only confirms after he’s taken Makoto’s face into his hands to make sure he isn’t a ghost. Makoto turns newly haunted eyes on him, the sort that will scar deeply and never heal all the way. He gently removes Sousuke’s hands by his wrists to hold them close to his chest just briefly, yet reverently, and releases him.

 _Be more careful,_ he says, a hollow smile in spite of despair.

* * *

 

They run— hobble, limp, trip— to the waterfall. Makoto likes it there.

At a distance, Hinohara is a cloud of black smoke punctured by the occasional shimmer of a rogue firework. They make a quick job of positioning themselves to obscure the scene from sight, downriver enough to stay dry. Sousuke can finally pause to look them both over. There’s blood everywhere, but that doesn’t immediately mean an emergency. Humans just bleed a lot, that much he’s been dulled to. But it’s in the way Makoto collapses before him that alarms him; not his body, which remains standing though is subject to fall to exhaustion at any moment, but his spirit. Sousuke watches a crushed and shattered mess of a phone slip from Makoto’s grasp and crash into the rocky river bank. Their clothes barely hold together. They lost half their emergency supplies escaping the village. Loss after loss, knocking them both to the ground before they ever fully got back on their feet. It never stops.

Sousuke hurries to Makoto as best he can trod around his punctured and throbbing heel. He begins to check him over for anything grave, but mostly he touches him just to touch him and remind him they’re okay, and they made it and it will be fine, don’t go to that place, Makoto, stay here. With me.

But Makoto shakes his head fervently and stops him. When Sousuke protests and resumes his movements, Makoto bats him away with force.

 _You’re hurt,_ Sousuke says. _Let me look—_

 _Stop it,_ Makoto answers.

_Makoto—_

“ _I left you there!_ ” he yells, to Sousuke’s stunned reception. The biting way it reads off his lips so sharp and clear, how he neglects to sign behind it, the force he screams into it drilling deep through Sousuke’s consciousness and slamming ice into his spine, doesn’t take hearing to understand. “I _left_ you!” Makoto draws in air, he screams it back out as fire and fury over the choppy rapids, until his face is red and his fists are steel and he doubles over how empty it leaves him. He draws to scream again, his sneering lips forming words Sousuke has not read off of them in a lifetime: “Haru! Rin!” A wail, a sob. A shattered, ugly, sustained

_“Everyone!”_

Sousuke looks to the waterfall, churning and rolling in perpetuity, and remembers how loud it’s supposed to be, and he realizes Makoto likes it here because he is allowed to scream just like this where nothing can hear him, and he laments how many times Makoto has come here to do just that, with Sousuke ignorant to how much he’s been choosing to suffer and bear on his own.

Sousuke waits as Makoto lays raw his anguish. He waits until Makoto can’t stand up straight anymore to do it again, and waits until he settles his trembling palms on the tops of his trembling thighs to catch his breath. Then Sousuke clears his throat to shake the dust from what he keeps locked away, and he does his best and fucking hopes it’s enough, because he doesn’t know how else to be louder than all this today.

“No,” he says. Makoto’s brow draws low and confused, and then with tortured features softening and unclouded, he looks to Sousuke with the last vestiges of awe he can conjure to his eyes, and he rightens again to turn his ear to Sousuke in mild disbelief and a dash of wonderment. It’s a victory worth the bother of speech. “You didn’t _._ ”

He won’t say anymore, about it or otherwise. Makoto heard him. It’s enough. Sousuke takes Makoto by his elbows, and Makoto allows Sousuke to sit them both down to rest before their legs force them to do it. He allows Sousuke to fuss over him, to pepper gestures of reverence and gratefulness to his skin when all of Makoto’s wounds are deeply cut and mottled black or burned pink but none of them are deadly. He allows Sousuke to dip his fingertips into the chilled river and blot at his face to break up his break down and wash away the grime and the ash and the blood. He allows Makoto to return all this to him as well, and worships the gentle quiet resettling over Makoto’s movements as he digs Sousuke out from beneath the same soils.

There is room now for this puncture of uncertainty to spread as poison and immobilize them again.

A broken promise lays half-submerged in mud and puddle next to Sousuke’s feet. Makoto long since fixed his gaze on it, but it is a focus devoid of hope or determination. Only one of resignation. Makoto expects them to wait for this to blow over and find another cellar to hide within. Waste away within. Get by within. What other viable choice is there, and Sousuke may still agree with such rhetoric if it means survival.

But resignation isn’t living. It never was before, never will be. It is not Makoto’s survival. So this is how Sousuke learns to protect Makoto, starting over again.

Sousuke lifts the phone from the sludge. He pushes through embatterment to stand again, dropping the token into his pocket to Makoto’s reserved, though present, curiosity.

 _We can try,_ he says to Makoto, and offers his hand, his shoulder, his leading step.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading
> 
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